BY JOHN K. WILSON
On August 7, I happened to read a syndicated column at FrontPageMag by Walter E. Williams, a legendary conservative intellectual and the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University. One paragraph shocked me:
Leaders of ISIS and the Taliban have called the recent U.S. trend of angry mobs destroying statues “inspiring but a bit amateur,” and agreed to send advisers to Antifa and other far-left groups on how to erase historical artifacts. “Destroying all art, culture and history from previous eras is obviously constructive,” said ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi. “But they’ve got to do it in a more dramatic way. We beheaded statues with a sword. The Taliban blew up ancient Buddhas with dynamite. Tying a statue to a truck and dragging it down just doesn’t have the same dramatic effect.”
When I read this paragraph in Williams’ column, I immediately thought that quote can’t possibly be real. And a little bit of searching quickly brought me to the source: A parody website called the Mideast Beast.
Williams not only used a fake quote, he essentially plagiarized the whole parody paragraph, which originally began:
Calling the recent US trend of angry mobs destroying statues “inspiring but a bit amateur,” leaders of ISIS and the Taliban have agreed to send advisors to Antifa and other far left groups on how to erase historical artifacts.
Williams slightly rearranged one sentence and changed “calling” to “called,” but otherwise he copied the 100-word paragraph word-for-word from the parody website.
If Williams somehow missed the obvious joke in the “obviously constructive” work of destroying art, he could have found a hint in the rest of the story, which quotes a Taliban leader: “if they’re just into blowing shit up and cheering, we can get behind that.”
How gullible do you have to be to think that the world’s most wanted terrorist organization would publicly announce that it’s sending advisors to the US to help Antifa commit crimes? How full of venom and hatred toward the left do you need to be to imagine that protesters are working with global terrorists?
I can understand believing something from a clever fake news site (I’ve done it myself before, as most of us have). But this is a particularly egregious case where Williams plagiarized an obvious fake quote that shouldn’t fool any discerning reader, and almost no editors caught it.
What’s also astonishing is that Williams’ serious mistake might easily have disappeared from history. It turns out that by the time I read Williams’ column several days after it was first published on August 4, Creators Syndicate had already found the error and corrected it. Out of the many publications that corrected the grotesque error by deleting the paragraph, none mentioned that any correction took place, including the Creators Syndicate site with the column.
Williams made a terrible mistake, and none of the places that corrected the error mentioned that anything important had been changed in the column, including Freedom’s Journal Institute, Capitalism Magazine, CNSNews, Newsbusters, TownHall.com, WND, Patriot Post, and the Daily Herald.
Jim Slusher, Assistant Managing Editor at the suburban Chicago Daily Herald, and the head editor of the Opinion section, wrote to me: “The column was originally published in print and online with the quotes from the satirical website. We got a later correction from the syndicate that had removed that paragraph and we updated the web version with it. We should have also noted the nature of the correction that had been made and have since done so.”
Salvador Rodriguez of the Orange County Register wrote to me, “I cut the paragraph in question out before publishing. I thought it was either a joke by Williams or that he’d fallen for a fake news site. Looked into it, concluded it was latter and cut it out. Around that time Creators Syndicate put out a call to strike the paragraph.”
The Creators Syndicate call apparently went only out to a few of the more major newspapers and websites that use the column. As of this afternoon, dozens of online conservative sites (some very small, some quite prominent) continue to include the fake quote in the column: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Winnipeg Sun, Toronto Sun, Edmonton Sun, Griffin Daily News, Times Examiner, LewRockwell.com, Northern Virginia Daily, Amarillo Globe-News, The National Interest, The New American, The Daily Signal, North State Journal, The Burning Platform, The World News, USSA News, Daily Journal, Daily Citizen-News, Sumter Item, Casper Star Tribune, Exponent Telegram, The Journal, Tyler Morning Telegraph, Denton Record-Chronicle, ArcaMax, Northern Virginia Daily, Jewish World Review, Leap Frog America, Political Bomb Show.
Interestingly, the error hasn’t been corrected on Williams’ own website or his Facebook page.
It’s quite possible that in the years to come, people searching for information about Antifa will think that ISIS and Taliban supported them, all because a distinguished professor made a dumb mistake and nobody cared enough to acknowledge the error.
Ironically, Williams’ entire column was about the danger of rewriting history. Williams wrote in the column, “A tyrant’s first battlefield is to rewrite history.” Maybe that’s also the battlefield of a gullible conservative pundit. In his column, Williams mockingly suggests a “Commission to Eliminate Bad Memories,” which he ended up needing for his column’s embarrassing mistake.
This seems to read an an attempt to use the “fake news” memetic, brewed together with some topical historicism, and innuendo of “grotesque” cognitive assault, and spin it into a smear on the broad “Conservative” camp, and to also smear and discredit the generally conservative George Mason University (one of our finest higher education institutions). You also apparently are indicting “conservative” media by making a laundry or black list of offending websites, and using them to generalize through logical fallacy.
Such phenomena, mistakes, parodies or liberties, are otherwise hardly constrained by political affiliation and no party or political science philosophy, holds a monopoly; indeed, the modern US political economy is largely a special interest captured domain, in its entirety.
Otherwise, you seem to be somewhat distracting from, apologizing for, or whitewashing ever so slightly, the real core issue: the violence, criminality and extortion by BLM and its affiliated entities such as Antifa. Apparently, the implication is that, by comparison, they destroyed public property with due regard to more civilized and considerate means than “Isis.”
Indeed, the parody of fake news you cite, is quite apropos to BLM’s physical destruction, and indeed, as University of Chicago political science professor Adom Getachew wrote in last weekend’s NYTimes, defending and celebrating BLM, it is only “an opening act” and “This historical reckoning is only the first step.” The next step is more violence, and escalated in sophistication. So perhaps such “parody” is actually pointing a quite serious direction (as parody often does) to real risk and threat?
Indeed, and moreover, BLM is precisely the US analogue of other synthetic terror organizations that are assembled for specific political operations, and then decommissioned, or as is more often the case, later re-formulated. The ‘parody’ in fact, may be deadly serious and reflective of reality. The US is witnessing an extraordinary, unprecedented assault on our political, public domain, by an organization that is ideologically centered in coercive identitarianism, combined with violent cultural Marxism. Its only ‘parody’ is where it all started: in the classrooms of the modern university. Readers may enjoy my upcoming op-ed essay, “Why BLM, Reparations and De-Colonization is ‘Junk’ History.”
Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago.
I wrote my below comment as Matt Anderson was writing this: BLM is “precisely the US analogue of other synthetic terror organizations that are assembled for specific political operations.” Some of you conservatives are in deep in conspiracy theory. Ever imagine that Black and other americans watch video of police killing Black people and actually want to protest this violence? That ever occur to you?
Wilson is not somehow evading the “real core issue” by looking at how respected professors are enabling lies to be mistaken for historical record. Unfortunately, as we watch this incredible backlash against BLM, this kind of false discourse is becoming precisely the real core issue.
Wow. Stunning. Nice work, John! The “mistake” is increasingly looking like a feature not a bug, as more and more outraged conservatives use Twitter and other sites to coin mocking shorthand of various left arguments. Some of the hysterical claims about BLM and other movements that I see on conservative professors’ Twitter feeds read like parody even when they are either sincere (and so unhinged)* or cynical, in an attempt to win over people who might be vulnerable to exaggerations and distortions.
*Some specificity: I live in Portland, half a mile from the nightly protests. The protest area is very, very small and very contained and life in Portland goes on the same as before. A colleague of mine at Portland State has been tweeting about the protests. He has either become unhinged and is living in a Portland of his own mind or he’s making a cynical attempt to reinforce Trump’s self-serving narrative about anarchy and chaos.
Living in a Portland of [one’s] own mind indeed.
Perhaps you either did not read, or have overlooked reports from the major media press:
“In a Thursday speech, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler declared protesters who started fires were “trying to commit murder”, saying he believed “city staff could have died.:
“Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Thursday evening condemned the actions of rioters who attempted to set fire to a police precinct and blocked the exits while officers were inside. “When you commit arson with an accelerant in an attempt to burn down a building that is occupied by people who you have intentionally trapped inside, you are not demonstrating, you are attempting to commit murder,” Wheeler said in a news conference with Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell.”
It seems from multiple news reports from all political affiliations, that you are blinded and captured by ideology to such an extent that even the above report is, evidently, merely “hysterical claims about BLM,” Unhinged, indeed. Life in Portland goes on the same as before? Evidently, attempted murder of Portland police officers by BLM rioters, is however, fortunately, “very, very small and very contained.” Indeed, that is exactly how the trapped police officers must have felt, as the exits to the burning building were blocked, and they were trapped inside.
Are you in fact a professor in a public university, instructing young adults? Does the AAUP condone such troubled perspective? What are the standards of the academy? This is just more evidence of what is sending parents, students, corporations and donors to alternative educational sectors.
Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago
I read many sources daily. I live here. I have been downtown at night. I can speak on the basis of my actual experience in this city. I do not think, though, that I can tell you anything about the reality here that you might actually hear.
Is this not also increasing regularly? I express my experience actually living in the city, I express my sense that BLM is about protesting police brutality against Black Americans, and immediately you want me to be censured by the AAUP? You want Turning Point or some group to start a campaign saying I am not fit to be a professor? Please reread Wilson’s essay above and think about the import of what he’s laying out.